SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
mental health
Politics Should Never Decide Who Gets Care
The Office of Management and Budget’s proposed rule putting political appointees in charge of healthcare-funding decisions threatens the patients we serve.
Jun 20, 2026
As a nurse educator and a psychiatric-mental health nurse, we have built our careers on evidence-based practice, ethics, and compassion when caring for patients. Politics never entered the picture. Our responsibility has always been to provide care guided by science, professional standards, and the individual needs of our patients, not political ideology or partisan priorities. That is why the Office of Management and Budget’s proposed rule, Docket OMB-2026-0034, which would hand healthcare funding decisions to political appointees, stops us cold.
At first glance, this proposal may sound administrative or technical. In reality, it would fundamentally alter how federally funded healthcare, nursing education, behavioral health programs, and scientific research are approved, monitored, and terminated. Under rule §200.340, any grant can be ended at any point if it no longer aligns with the priorities of the administration. That is not oversight. It is political control.
For nurses, the consequences would not be abstract. They would be immediate, personal, and dangerous for the patients we care for.
Psychiatric nursing already operates within a fragile system. Across the United States, communities face severe shortages of mental health professionals; long wait times for psychiatric care; rising suicide rates; surging substance use disorders; and escalating mental health crises among children, veterans, and older adults. Nurses are often the last line of support for patients who have nowhere else to go.
Healthcare funding decisions should be based on patient outcomes, workforce needs, public health evidence, and community impact, not whether a program aligns with the political priorities of whichever party holds power.
Every day, we talk with parents who are doing everything they can to find behavioral care for their children, but too often they feel frustrated and alone. Parents often share that they spend months calling providers, sitting on waitlists, and navigating insurance paperwork, all while trying to support their child through daily challenges at school and at home.
Hospitals are faced with the daunting task of finding inpatient services for patients in crisis. Sometimes the search for placement takes hours or even days, resulting in patients, many of them young people and the elderly, sitting in over-crowded emergency departments, waiting for care that may never come.
Many of the programs that train psychiatric nurses, support community mental health services, fund suicide prevention initiatives, and expand rural behavioral healthcare depend on federal grants and cooperative agreements. Under §200.205, the proposed OMB rule places a single political appointee in control over those funding decisions, with the power to override independent scientific and professional review.
This should alarm every American, regardless of political affiliation.
Healthcare funding decisions should be based on patient outcomes, workforce needs, public health evidence, and community impact, not whether a program aligns with the political priorities of whichever party holds power. Mental healthcare especially requires stability, continuity, and trust. When funding becomes politicized, patients inevitably suffer.
We are equally concerned about the chilling effect this rule would have on nursing schools and healthcare education programs. Federal support helps nursing programs prepare students to work in underserved communities, conduct behavioral health research, develop telepsychiatry services, and address disparities in care. Under §200.206 a political appointee could deny funding to any institution deemed “un-American,” a standard so vague it could be applied to programs addressing mental health disparities, harm reduction, or any work that falls outside current political favor.
We encourage nurses, educators, researchers, and the general public to join us and submit public comments on Docket OMB-2026-0034 before July 13, 2026, urging federal officials to reject these policies.
The proposed rule threatens the integrity of evidence-based practice itself. Nursing education is built on teaching students how to evaluate research critically, apply best practices, and advocate for patient-centered care. We cannot tell future nurses to “follow the science” while simultaneously allowing political officials to override scientific peer review and the expertise of those closest to patients.
We know what happens when systems become unstable. We witnessed it during the pandemic. Burnout rises. Staffing worsens. Experienced clinicians leave. Patients wait longer for care. Rural communities lose services first. One of us lived through the 2025 Southern California wildfires. Vulnerable populations suffer most. The mental health system was already stretched thin before the flames arrived.
This OMB proposal risks accelerating those exact outcomes.
Public trust in healthcare depends on the belief that medical and scientific decisions are guided by expertise rather than ideology. Once political influence is written into the structure of healthcare funding, that trust may never be fully restored. Mental health patients already fight stigma, long waits, and shrinking access to care. They should never have to wonder whether a political appointee is shaping the care available to them.
Nurses are educated to protect human dignity, promote health equity, and uphold evidence-based care. Those values do not change depending on which party controls Washington. They are foundational to the nursing profession and guide how nurses advocate for patients, families, and communities every single day.
The OMB proposal is framed as a restructuring of federal financial assistance, but for healthcare professionals on the ground, it represents something much larger: a deliberate shift away from independent expertise and toward political control over healthcare priorities. That does not strengthen nursing, mental healthcare, or public health. It dismantles all three.
We encourage nurses, educators, researchers, and the general public to join us and submit public comments on Docket OMB-2026-0034 before July 13, 2026, urging federal officials to reject these policies. If we allow political ideology to dictate which healthcare programs survive, which research is funded, and which communities receive support, we risk abandoning the very people the healthcare system exists to protect.
Nurses stand at the bedside of patients during their most vulnerable moments, regardless of politics, income, geography, or background. Federal healthcare policy should reflect a similar commitment. The future of mental healthcare, nursing education, and public trust in science depends on preserving independent, evidence-based decision-making free from political interference. Our patients deserve nothing less.
Keep ReadingShow Less
You Can Mute Notifications But You Can't Escape the Algorithm
Social media companies have intentionally designed their products to be addictive to young users; the issue cannot be resolved until the entire architecture of the platforms is overhauled.
Jun 14, 2026
You can mute Instagram stories. You can turn off Snap Maps. You can silence every notification on your phone. But try turning off reels. Try removing your “explore page.” Try turning off your TikTok algorithm.
Social media platforms have spent years perfecting the art of giving users just enough control to feel empowered, but not enough to actually break away. The result is a false sense of autonomy. Psychology Today cites that users used to control their feeds by choosing who to follow and which posts to interact with, but most platforms have shifted to algorithms that prioritize content for users based upon its likelihood of engagement. Consumers now get countless settings to reorganize the surface level features of a structure that cannot be fundamentally changed.
These apps enable endless settings to facilitate an illusion of control, whether that be through settings privacy, hiding like counts, or blocking certain pages. But none of these features are meaningful. They all act as a decoy to prevent change from the much deeper issue.
The features you cannot turn off are the ones that keep you scrolling hour after hour. It is the product of years of behavioral engineering, precisely designed to exploit dopamine loops and addiction to keep account holders in a cycle that generates a feeling of continuous rewards. The ability to scroll infinitely on any platform through videos and suggested posts prevents the natural end that a finite feed would create. As time goes on, algorithms adapt to the users employing them. It understands what will make you excited, enraged, or captivated, all at the expense of your attention span and countless unreturnable hours of your life.
The question isn’t about how to not use social media—it's unavoidable. It’s about if you even have the ability to not use it.
In a landmark case in March of 2026, Meta and Youtube were just found guilty of intentionally addicting young users and damaging their mental health. The juries found them both negligent in the design of their platforms, knowing it was dangerous and failing to appropriately warn of the risks. The companies were required to pay $3 million in compensatory damages, and jurors recommended another $3 million in punitive damages.
This verdict is revolutionary because for the first time, the law has indicated that the design of the apps was the issue, rather than the content or the users. It changes the conversation from blaming consumers for being on social media too much to recognizing these apps are designed to make it impossible to walk away. This trial could set the precedent for the over 1,500 similar cases that have been filed against the companies.
The findings of this case are nothing new. For countless years, tobacco companies sold cigarettes knowing the devices engineered customer addiction, while vehemently denying the harm every step of the way. It's easy to reflect on that chapter of history with clearer vision, but it was difficult to spot in the moment. Now we are living through its modern day counterpart.
The difference in these cases is that purchasing cigarettes takes explicit effort, but social media follows you everywhere you go. It’s in your pocket, it’s with you at school, in the office; no place is out of reach and no moment is off-limits. There is no social media equivalent of a “no smoking zone” or too inappropriate of a place to check your phone. It is a socially enabled addiction with no guardrails to limit engagement.
The question isn’t about how to not use social media—it's unavoidable. It’s about if you even have the ability to not use it. When the entire algorithm is designed to keep you from clicking away, and keep the app gaining revenue, it’s not about your personal autonomy anymore, it's about the devices keeping you from being able to physically peel yourself away.
Politicians can see this problem too. California AB 2169 would require companies to provide a copy of their personal data, including behavioral profiles and the digital map of online interactions. It also mandates that platforms build a bridge to allow users to sync their friends and interactions to other apps. Michigan's Kids Over Clicks package SB 757-760 goes further to prohibit platforms from using minors' personal data to fuel recommendation algorithms without parental consent, banning manipulative patterns like streaks and reward systems to incentivize continued app usage, and strictly regulating AI companion chatbots that could encourage self-harm or serve as unlicensed therapists.
While these bills make leaps toward restoring user autonomy, none of them actually address social media addiction head-on. Knowing the features these apps use to trap you into endless scrolling is helpful but doesn’t stop the behavior at its core. The option to turn off these privacy settings and default restrictions is still present. The problem isn’t the content on the apps, but the design. We can’t stop at changing the features and restructuring the settings. The issue cannot be resolved until the entire architecture of the platforms is overhauled.
I’ll leave you with this: We already know how the story ends if we do nothing as we have lived it before. So what are we going to do today to write a different ending?
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Isn't Mentally Ill; He's Evil
Repeating time and time again that Donald Trump is crazy not only negatively affects the mentally ill but also seriously misunderstands the man and his policies.
May 14, 2026
Dear public figures, media folks, and journalists, please do not suggest that President Donald Trump is crazy. It is not helpful and, in fact, it is hurtful... not to him but the rest of us.
There are two main reasons for this request. First, calling Trump crazy is harmful to people who have a mental health condition or who have loved ones with a mental illness; second, it is inaccurate and leads to a serious misunderstanding of the man, his behavior, and it’s origins and consequences.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of unfair, hurtful, and false seterotypes of the mentally ill that are propagated and repeated over and over again in our society. For instance, media figures and journalists often describe perpetrators of violence as mentally ill. Generally speaking, this is not true. Study after study points out the the mentally ill, in fact, are not violent. Indeed, they are more likely to be the victims of violence than perpetrators of it. Most people with mental health diagnoses are law-abiding contributing members of society. Epidemiological research indicates that 97% of those with mental illness do not commit violent acts.
Nor are the mentally ill immoral. It is somewhat commonplace to find public figures, journalists, and other “experts” express that a person who commits a horribly immoral act must be mentally ill. This is a faulty presumption. Mental illness does not necessarily affect moral reasoning or understanding. It is pretty common to hear or read that those whose behaviors are irrational, unpredictable, or erratic must have a mental health condition. This, also, is a harmful and erroneous stereotype. After all, irrational thinking is pretty common. We are all irrational some of the time and in some situations. and also rational and predictable in others. Irrational thoughts are completely normal. Researchers sometimes point out that some kinds of mental illness may include a deficit in common sense or deviations from social norms but not a deficit in logical thought or “reason.”
Finally, the dictionary defines evil as actions and ideas characterized by impending future misfortune. There has never been a president of the United States more ominous than Donald Trump.
Another common misconception about those with mental illnesses is that they are dysfunctional and unable to live as honest and contributing members of their communities. This, too, is not true. The majority of those with a mental illness are simply ordinary folks. In any given year 20% or more of the population has a mental health diagnosis. Therefore, at any given time, there are millions of people with a mental health condition making positive contributions to their communities.
So, why do so many of us hold these false and damaging steretypes about those with a mental health condition? Perhaps the most common communicator of these misconceptions are the media of mass communication, both fictional (television, movies, internet sites, etc) and nonfiction (talk shows, news media, politicians, etc).
This brings me to Donald Trump. Repeating time and time again that Donald Trump is crazy not only negatively affects the mentally ill but also seriously misunderstands the man and his policies.
Donald Trump is not crazy, he is evil. The America Heritage Dictionary definition of evil has three components. The first one is that evil means morally bad or wrong. The list of the immoral acts of our president is too long to be included listed completely here, but consider just a sampling: participating in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses, illegally detaining and deporting veterans, children, and others; using charitable donations for personal desires; separating innocent children from their families; fomenting racism and racial hatred; ridiculing the disabled; daily misogyny; supporting white supremacy; inciting violence; lying for personal gain; harming the lives of LGBTQ+ people; taking food and medical care from children and their families; and the list goes on and on.
The dictionary also defines evil as harmful or causing injury and pain. Rather than repeating the cruel and hateful list above, please consider this sampling of the harmful consequences of decisions of President Trump: ordering the murder of hundreds of people who have been in boats attacked because they were supposedly carrying illegal drugs; murdering nearly a hundred people in Venezuela when the country was attacked and he ordered its president arrested; causing death and injury to tens of thousands of Iranians during his war against the government of that country; partnering with Israel's raining of death and destruction on the people of Lebanon, Gaza, and Palestine; expanding the embargo against Cuba causing pain, injury, and death to ordinary Cubans; and his administration’s defunding of the medical aid and food assistance provided to less developed nations by the US Agency for International Development, which has damaged the lives of millions of people around the world.
And, of course, actions of this president also have caused harmful and deadly damages within the United States. Consider: the terrible harms, injuries, and deaths caused by his orders to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), resulting in the detention of over 50,000 adults and children in dangerous and deadly detention centers; he also has deported millions of individuals, some to dangerous countries or to the very life-threatening situations they fled. In addition, he has empowered his ICE agents to injure and even murder US citizens who were exercising their political and personal rights; Trump’s defunding of federal programs in the areas of healthcare and the environment has stripped men, women, and children of their access to food and medical care, causing pain, injury, and death to many people; and his administration’s reductions of environmental protections and general disregard of climate change threatens the health of all living beings,
Finally, the dictionary defines evil as actions and ideas characterized by impending future misfortune. There has never been a president of the United States more ominous than Donald Trump. Nearly every day he posts messages that threaten his critics and opponents. He says he will use the power of the government to bring them down. He tells his supporters, “I am your retribution.” Time and time again, he threatens to destroy Iran, razing it to the ground and killing millions of Iranians. He announces planes to annex Greenland, Canada, and Venezuela. He hints that he is going to use force to change the political-economic system in Cuba. He says he will prosecute his political opponents for treason and has threatened to shoot those protesting in the streets. And, of course, he regularly declares that he will imprison immigrants and deport them to dangerous places. In just one year he has threatened to punish, invade, or take control of Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Nigeria, and Iran.
So, dear news anchors and pundits, please stop suggesting that President Donald Trump is mentally ill. Doing so defames and insults those of us who have a mental illness and misunderstands the problem that is Donald Trump. He is not “crazy.” He is prejudiced, cruel, violent, hateful, uninformed, dangerous, and immoral. Our president is not mentally ill. Our president is evil.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular